In March of 2007 Partimus was officially acknowledged as 501(c)(3) Organization for our educational work. To celebrate, we thought we’d take a look back over the past ten years, to see how we’ve grown and changed as an organization.

As we were working on incorporation in 2006, our efforts began quite broadly. We shipped five computers to the Computers-4-Kids organization in Austin, Texas. In 2007 incorporation allowed us to be eligible for a grant from the Anita Borg Foundation to acquire and supply five computers to an all-girls after-school mathematics club for 5th graders run by CEMELA (Center for the Mathematics Education of Latinas/os). 30 desktops were also built, installed, tested, and shipped to an elementary school in Huajuapan de Leon, Mexico in collaboration with ZaReason.

In 2009 efforts started to focus more locally in the San Francisco Bay Area, where our efforts remain today. In 2009 we installed a total of 51 stand-alone Linux-based systems at two schools, including a fully-fuctional 31-seat Linux computer network at the Creative Arts Charter School and systems at KIPP San Francisco Bay Academy.

Today our work continues with an initiative to support adult learning. In February of this year ECS announced the formal completion of our 18-month project with them to provide public computers for their residents. Work continues on these six sites with over a dozen computers as we maintain and improve the labs, as well as look into further education opportunities for the residents.

Huge thanks to all the volunteers, individual donors, companies, and organizations who we have collaborated with over these very productive ten years. We’ve helped hundreds of students with access to computers, worked with teachers, community leaders and more to empower the spread of education through technology in our communities.

Back in October, Christian Einfeldt interviewed Liz Pocock, the Director of Housing Development and Asset Management at Episcopal Community Services (ECS) about her work in low-income housing facilities and how the residents had been using our Linux-based computers in the first residence we deployed in, The Crosby.

Over the winter, I spent some time debugging some slowness issues over at The Crosby with one of the residents. A new switch was purchased with Partimus funds to replace an aging hub that had been used previously. With that, their networking was fast again! Christian also spent time debugging a few issues, including some problems with logins and changes to default settings.

This spring, Christian has continued his work with ECS to meet with staffers to futher the progress of bringing donated computers running Lubuntu to install systems into more low-income facilities. Today in addition to The Crosby, we also have computers at the Elm low-income shelter. Our work is continuing into a third and fourth ECS facility as we speak.

This brings our total today to four computers at two low-income facilities. We’ve been delighted to see how well the Lubuntu desktops are received. At the request of residents seeking to use an office suite, LibreOffice has also been installed on the systems.

Our hope is that these networked systems that provide internet access to the residents will empower them to take a more active role in a community and world that’s so heavily connected.

If you’re interested in donating some computers or offering your services to Partimus, reach out to us at contact@partimus.org with details about your hardware or skills. We’re specifically looking for experienced Linux systems administrators who can make the time to implement and document the creation of a provisioning and proxy server at each location to ease installations and be more gentle on the bandwidth. Learn about our minimum specifications for hardware requirements and other ways to donate on our website: Partimus Donations. Partimus is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization, donations are tax deductible in the US.

You’ve heard of “Black Friday” and “Cyber Monday”. Now here comes “Giving Tuesday“, an effort to formally kick off the season of giving. Giving Tuesday was started by a New York City community organization called 92Y, which is an educational organization on 92nd Street and Lexington Street in New York City.

The “Giving Tuesday” logo

We at Partimus focus on giving all year around to public schools and to homeless shelters or low income shelters. We believe that free open source software can revolutionize These institutions’ budgets, by bringing them high quality software on quality pre-owned computers. The software used on our computers is the same software that runs the supercomputers of Google, Facebook, Twitter, and 70% of the world’s equity stock trades. We want to make sure that public school kids will grow up with a deep understanding of how to use the incredible tools of the Internet, and that people in low income shelters can do the research they need to get good paying jobs. (The City of Munich has saved 11 million Euros since 2006 by moving to the software, and one school district in Pennsylvania saved $360,000.00 with open source software. The same advantage can be enjoyed by public schools and low income shelters the world over.)

You can help us make this happen by either purchasing a beautiful Ubuntu-themed set of earrings or a Ubuntu-themed necklace, or by simply donating directly to our efforts. Partimus is an all-volunteer organization, and your donations will help us grow our mission, reach more schools and low income shelters, and be more effective at bridging the digital divide. Six dollar from each set of earrings and $10 dollars from each necklace will go directly to Partimus, a registered 501(c)(3).

The silver-colored necklace

The beauty of giving to Partimus is that you will help us teach schools and low income shelters that beginning now with free open source software such as Ubuntu GNU-Linux will assure that these institutions will always have access to the latest, best software without burdensome licensing costs.

Partimus has recently installed and is now supporting GNU-Linux computers in a low-income housing residence in San Francisco called The Crosby. Located in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, The Crosby is run by the Episcopal Community Services of San Francisco (ECS) which provides about half of the adult shelter beds in San Francisco, according to its website. Partimus has started its work at The Crosby with a pilot projects of two machines running Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. For beautiful and inspiring videos of how ECS is helping people transition from homelessness, go to this website and scroll down or go here for the story of the end to Jimmy’s homelessness or here for the story of the end to Rita’s homelessness.

Partimus volunteers installed the Ubuntu 14.04 machines at The Crosby on September 29, and have been supporting those machines since that time with simple administrative services. We recently sent a list of questions to Elizabeth Pocock, who is responsible for the oversight of the Partimus computer pilot project, to see how the project is faring so far. Here is her response to those questions:

What is your role with The Crosby and ECS?

I am the Director of Housing Development & Asset Management for ECS. I ensure that each of ECS’s sites, including The Crosby, is in compliance with regulations and standards regarding building safety. I plan and arrange for improvements–physical and aesthetic–at all sites, and secure the funding to make it all possible.

In a nutshell, what is the mission of ECS in general and The Crosby?

ECS’s Mission: ECS of San Francisco helps homeless and very low-income people every day and every night obtain the housing, jobs, shelter, and essential services each person needs to prevent and end homelessness. ECS’s Support Services Team at The Crosby operates with this mission in mind while they support their residents (all of whom are formerly homeless) in various ways with the ultimate goal of helping residents remain stably housed.

How long had you been considering providing public access computers for residents at The Crosby?

ECS strives to have computer labs at every property, but public access computers such as the ones provided by Partimus were a new and innovative idea that came from talking with (Partimus Board member) Christian Einfeldt.

How does the Partimus Linux mini-lab fit in with your mission at ECS in general and The Crosby in particular?

Providing The Crosby with community computers and WiFi, free-of-charge, helps enable them to easily access the online and offline resources that many of us take for granted, from job and skills attainment to convenient email access to word processing.

What is your first impression with Linux so far, compared with your experience with Microsoft Windows? Meaning, is Linux fairly similar in your experience thus far, and if there is a difference, what is it? Or does Linux seem to be pretty much the same as Microsoft Windows in what it can do?

Our residents report no difference or difficulty navigating the computers!

What is the reaction of the residents so far to the Partimus Linux mini-lab at the Crosby?

Very happy and highly utilitized! We have a lot of residents hopping on and off several times a day. It really helps them be able to navigate the world with much more ease.

Do you see any other uses for Partimus Linux computers in the future with ECS or The Crosby?

ECS hopes to bring community computers to all its housing sites and programs as well.

As we previously blogged about, J. David Eisenberg has donated 15 good computers (with monitors, mice and keyboards) to Partimus, and since the time of that March 27 blog, we have been replacing old machines with David’s newer machines. It has been slow, steady progress. On April 17, David came back to the Ascend school, and he and tech teacher Abigail Rudner and I triaged 6 machines and installed Lubuntu on 5 of the machines.

Since then, we have replaced some of the slower, noisier machines with David’s newer, quieter, faster machines. It is a constant process of installing machines, putting new machines into production, taking slower machines out of production, and then checking back with Abigail to make sure that the replaced machines are working as expected, and supporting her as she makes tweaks to the system.

Today, Sean Castro of Education for Change and I triaged some more machines, replacing two machines that had only 500 MB of RAM each with two of David’s machines, which have 1 GB of RAM each. Until we get our PXE / proxy server in place, we are now manually installing the machines, setting up the admin accounts and the student user accounts, and placing a few important icons on the desktop of each of the machines.

A computer lab is a little bit like a garden. I takes constant weeding to take out the “weeds” that sprout up as children explore the computers, inevitably damaging them or creating untidy desktop spaces in the process; and replacing dying machines with newer machines. The key to making the “garden” work is having a caring teacher like Abigail create a positive environment that causes both the students and the volunteers supporting the lab to believe that the lab is a good and worthy thing that deserves nurturing and caring.

If students take good care of the machines, as the do in Abigails’ lab, then the volunteers pick up on that energy of caring, and keep the machines in good working order. When the students see that the machines are in good working order, they in turn do good school work on the machines, and keep the machines and the physical lab environment tidy and in good order. It all comes together like a symphony, with the players all playing their tunes to create a beautiful creation.

Thanks to Amo Kaci of Education for Change for mentoring Sean Castro and for helping to support Abigail in maintaining the lab, and thanks to Sean for his work in the lab today and in the past. Thanks again to J. David Eisenberg for his great donation of the machines, and thanks to Jim Stockford of Systemateka for helping to get the machines from David’s donation collection site to the Ascend school.

The use of free open source software in schools is already quite big, and yet it’s still in its infancy. Here is a story about two different people and the remarkable results they have created with free open source software in the education communities they lead. What’s common to these stories is the educational value of involving students in the development and implementation of their technology. If you are wondering what can be done with free open source software in education, look first to these two leaders as an example of the great thing that can be accomplished.

Charlie Reisinger. Charlie wanted to experiment with free open source software in education, and he decided to go big. He envisioned high school kids taking home Linux notebooks. But not just the techie kids. All of the kids. He eventually rolled out an install base of 1700 notebook computers in the Lancaster, Pennsylvania, school district.

But the particularly cool thing about his project was the way he included students into the project. Doing the project became an education experience in itself. Working under close adult supervision, the kids installed Ubuntu GNU-Linux on the laptops. And the kids are also part of the support team, with their support team blog here, and their twitter support account here.

His effort was so successful that he was invited to give a talk on it at the famous TEDx conference. If you want to get a big picture of what Charlie is doing with his Linux in education project, click here on his TEDx presentation. If you want inspiration about what free open source software can do in education, be sure to watch Charlie’s TEDx talk. And you can follow Charlie on Twitter here.

Not content to rest on his laurels, after just one year of running the one-to-one laptop program in high school, Charlie is planning to roll it out to middle school students in the Autumn of 2015.

Stu Keroff’s Staff Photo for the Community School of Excellence in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Stu Keroff. Stu orchestrated the acquisition of a cart of 30 Linux computers and a Linux mini-lab of 5 machines for a middle school called the Community School of Excellence in St. Paul, Minnesota. Most of the students at the school are Hmong and Karenni. Stu has called on the students’ common cultural heritage to foster a strong sense of community identity with his young Linux technicians, who call themselves the “Asian Penguins“.

You feel that sense of community by watching the videos on the Asian Penguins’ website. In watching those videos, I was struck by how articulate, mature, and responsible these middle school students are, shown in this local TV news story about the Asian Penguins. They don’t seem to be silly or giggly in doing their technology work. They seem to understand the value of having control over their technology, of taking ownership of it. For example, they also seem to do a good job of taking charge of the installation of Linux computers in the homes of people in the community, as shown here, where a group of girls install a Linux computer in someone’s home. As with Charlie Reisinger, Stu Keroff understands that the practice of working on these Linux machines, managing the machines, and installing them in homes is itself a hugely valuable educational experience. You can follow Stu here on his Twitter page.

Yesterday was what you would call a good day. I met Jim Stockford in the morning at 8:00 am in San Francisco, and he drove us from San Francisco down to San Jose to meet David Eisenberg, a local college professor, to pick up some computers that David had in storage. Fifteen computers, to be exact, all of which meet the Partimus specs, for deployment in public schools such as the Ascend school in Oakland.

We loaded all fifteen machines, with monitors, into Jim’s SUV and David’s sedan, and headed over to the Ascend school in Oakland, where we dropped off the machines with Ascend technology teacher Abigail Rudner and her volunteer assistant, Brianna Niver.

The next step for those machines will be for Abigail to install Lubuntu GNU-Linux on a few of the machines to replace some of the slower, older machines in her lab. In the meantime, Partimus volunteer Tai Kedzierski of Help Use IT is heading up a team to prepare a PXE boot and proxy server to help Abigail mass-install a specialized version of Lubuntu on each of the students’ machines. Here is a photo of the four of us who were still around at the very end of the delivery of the newer machines to Abigail’s Linux lab:

Professor Eisenberg not only acquired the 15 new machines for Partimus, he also stored them for a considerable time and then help load, unload, and drive them to Oakland. Thanks so much for your help and your remarkable donation, David!

But what about the Mystery Man, Jim Stockford? He is a frequent Partimus volunteer, Systems Engineer with Systemateka.com, and has been known to rock audiences at San Francisco Bay Area venues with a punk band called The Nubs. In fact, after graciously driving, loading and unloading machines for 3 hours that morning, he had to rush back to a head-banging band practice with said Nubs. And all he left behind was this mysterious photograph, so I guess you are just going to have to pay to the see the Nubs to see him in action:

Thanks very much to David Eisenberg, Abigail Rudner, Brianna Niver, and Mystery Man Jim Stockford for your great help!

Partimus was founded by two women, Cathy Malmrose and Maile Urbancic, and ever since, supporting women in STEM has been an important priority for Partimus. So we are re-posting this email to help spread the word about upcoming coding opportunties for women and girls.

First is Girls Who Code. If you know a girl who you think might be interested in exploring coding this summer, now would be a good time to bring Girls Who Code to her attention. Girls Who Code provides girls with exposure to both great experience in creating with code, as well as exposure to highly successful women in technology, meaning women who run major tech organizations and companies. Prior knowledge of coding is not necessary, and girls who are completely new to coding have created some really significant pieces of software as part of the summer program with Girls Who Code. But time is running short, so now is the time to look at this program.

Second is the Google Summer of Code, and third is the Outreachy intership program, both of which are described below in an open email send out this week:

Google Summer of Code is a global program that offers students stipends to write code for projects from 137 participating FOSS organizations. Applicants must be able to make the project their primary focus during the summer. Participants work remotely from home, while getting guidance from an assigned mentor and collaborating within their project’s community. The application deadline for Google Summer of Code is March 27 and the program dates are May 25 to August 21. The stipend for the program is $5,500 (USD).

In an effort to improve diversity in FOSS, a number of organizations are offering similar remote and mentored Outreachy internships through a program organized by Software Freedom Conservancy. These internships are open to women (cis and trans), trans men, and genderqueer people. Applicants must be available for full-time, 40-hours a week, internships. The application deadline for Outreachy is March 24 and the program dates are May 25 to August 25. The stipend for the program is also $5,500 (USD). Unlike in Google Summer of Code, participants do not need to be students and non-coding projects are available. In addition to coding, projects include such tasks as graphic design, user experience design, documentation, bug triage and community engagement.

As previously mentioned on this Partimus blog, Eric P. Scott, a frequent Partimus volunteer, recently departed this life. Here is another photo of Eric that has been circulating recently on Linux email lists:

Eric P. Scott, a frequent Partimus volunteer. Thanks for all you did for Partimus, Eric!

A celebration of Eric’s life will be held on March 18 at 7:30 pm at one of his favorite pizza restaurants, Pascquales Pizzaria at 700 Irving Street, 415-661-2140, near the corner of 8th Avenue in San Francisco. Please RSVP to Ron Hipschman at ronh at exo dot net if you are planning on attending.

One of Eric’s favorite pizza places, 700 Irving Street, 415-661-2140, near the corner of 8th Avenue in San Francisco

I have just learned that, on January 16, 2015, the San Francisco Bay Area free open source software community suffered the loss of a dear friend, Eric P. Scott. Eric’s passing was a setback for Partimus, as he contributed thousands of dollars worth of his time to helping Partimus on its mission of placing and supporting GNU-Linux computers in schools for students from low and modest income households. Here is shot of Eric at a triagefest in a public charter school, the KIPP San Francisco Bay Academy:

Eric P. Scott, middle back row. Click on the picture to see it larger.

Partimus Board member Elizabeth Krumbach Joseph has written a thorough and moving homage to Eric here on her personal blog. I cannot personally improve on that blog, and so will only speak briefly to summarize the wonderful things that Eric did from my perspective as a relatively simple end user of free open source software.

Whenever I organized an event of any kind around free open source software, I could always count on Eric to bring his deep knowledge about free open source software to the event. From my perspective as a relatively simple end user, I always needed someone with Eric’s skill base to attend these events, because I didn’t have that kind of technical knowledge. I would have an overview as to what the teachers wanted to accomplish with a computer network, but I was not capable of doing anything other than reaching out to others to give specific shape and form to the teachers’ needs.

Eric’s deep technical knowledge and his frequent appearance at my events meant that I always had at least one person in the room who could handle just about any technical problem that could come up. Eric’s advanced skill level meant that he could easily charge hundreds of dollars per hour for his skills, but he was always very giving of his time to schools, teachers and ultimately children who would never be able to afford his talent.

Eric’s deep skills also meant that the job would get done quickly, and done correctly the first time, which meant that there was a lot of time to put polish and professionalism on the jobs we did. We were not fumbling around for solutions, thanks in part to Eric’s guidance and his ability to zero in on just the right solution at the right time. Oh, and he often also brought just the right physical tool that others might not have thought to bring, which speaks to his incredible foresight and presence of mind.

Eric was also a renaissance man, widely knowledgeable about any topic that would come up. He always was ready with a funny comment, or an interesting bit of information on any topic. Bringing together a group of volunteers to give generously of their time is so much easier when there is a good esprit de corps, and Eric’s bright wit, technical chops, and presence of mind helped buoy the group’s spirit to keep them going despite occasional frustrations with the challenging economic and logistical circumstances facing the schools, teachers and students we serve.

The above photograph of our group of volunteers is a fitting one to remember Eric by, as directly over our heads stands an inspirational motto taught to the children of the KIPP system. The children are taught to do the right thing not to avoid punishment or to seek a reward, but because, as the “Level 6” sign says almost directly over Eric’s head: “It’s my code. This is who I am.” That statement fits Eric to the letter. He gave of himself because that is the kind of person he was: generous, thoughtful, industrious, insightful, and caring.

Eric, on behalf of Partimus.org, I want to thank you for masterful technical guidance, your considerable donation of your valuable time, and your unswerving generosity of spirit and leadership. My life is greatly enriched for having known you, as are the lives of the students and educators you have served.

Additional discussions of Eric’s departure and remarkable giving life can be found here.